The long journey of women towards justice (original) (raw)
"Gendering the Comparative Analysis of Welfare States" (2009)
Can feminists count on welfare states-or at least some aspects of these complex systems-as resources in the struggle for gender equality? Gender analysts of "welfare states" investigate this question and the broader set of issues around the mutually constitutive relationship between systems of social provision and regulation and gender. Feminist scholars have moved to bring the contingent practice of politics back into grounded fields of action and social change and away from the reification and abstractions that had come to dominate models of politics focused on "big" structures and systems, including those focused on "welfare states." Conceptual innovations and reconceptualizations of foundational terms have been especially prominent in the comparative scholarship on welfare states, starting with gender, and including care, autonomy, citizenship, (in)dependence, political agency, and equality. In contrast to other subfields of political science and sociology, gendered insights have to some extent been incorporated into mainstream comparative scholarship on welfare states. The arguments between feminists and mainstream scholars over the course of the last two decades have been productive, powering the development of key themes and concepts pioneered by gender scholars, including "defamilialization," the significance of unpaid care work in families and the difficulties of work-family "reconciliation," gendered welfare state institutions, the relation between fertility and women's employment, and the partisan correlates of different family and gender policy models. Yet the mainstream still resists the deeper implications of feminist work, and has difficulties assimilating concepts of care, gendered power, dependency, and interdependency. Thus, the agenda of gendering comparative welfare state studies remains unfinished. To develop an understanding of what might be needed to finish that agenda, I assess the gendered contributions to the analysis of modern systems of social provision, starting with the concept of gender itself, then moving to studies of the gendered division of labor (including care) and of gendered political power.
Estudios Working Papers, 1996
I would like to thank Renee Monson for helpful comments and discussions about gendered interests, the nature of the relationship between gender relations and welfare states, and the feminization of poverty. Thanks to Kathrina Zippel for general research assistance on this project, and for providing a summary of the literature on gender and the welfare state in Germany, including many works written in German.
Annual Review of Sociology, 1996
I would like to thank Renee Monson for helpful comments and discussions about gendered interests, the nature of the relationship between gender relations and welfare states, and the feminization of poverty. Thanks to Kathrina Zippel for general research assistance on this project, and for providing a summary of the literature on gender and the welfare state in Germany, including many works written in German.
Women's Lives and Poverty: Developing a Framework of Real Reform for Welfare
J. Soc. & Soc. Welfare, 2008
The historic 1996 welfare reform is typically regarded as a successful public policy. Using the limited success metric of "reducing welfare rolls," welfare evaluations and analysis have obscured the lived ex-periences of recipients, particularly among women, who are dispro- ...
WOMEN IN THE PATRIARCHAL WELFARE STATE
This essay analyses the implications of the state performing a welfare function for an extended period of time in relation to the social contract between women citizens and the state. It argues that a prolonged status of 'welfare provider' ascribes certain patriarchal attributes to the state, which in turn reduces the position of the citizens, especially women, to a mere 'beneficiary' level. With the use of two specific policy documents relating to public health – Well Woman Clinic (WWC) programme launched in 1996, and the Population and Reproductive Health (PRH) policy designed in 1998 – it shows that in the absence of a rights based approach to public health, women have become mere beneficiaries, as opposed to active citizens, of the prolonged welfare State of Sri Lanka. This relationship has deterred women citizens from exercising the right to demand their needs from the State.
Gøsta Esping-Andersen, Incomplete Revolution: Adapting Welfare States to Women’s New Roles
Canadian Journal of Sociology, 2010
S ome years ago, Gøsta Esping-Andersen vowed to dedicate himself to anything but the welfare state. Luckily for sociologists and others interested in the changes and challenges of welfare states, he reneged on that vow. The principal argument of this book, which is certain to be as enticing as it is controversial, is that the thus far incomplete revolution in women's roles is provoking serious disequilibria in societies. Arguing that the term "revolution" is appropriate to describe women's changed and changing roles, Esping-Andersen claims that well-established ways of being and doing have been turned upside-down. He argues that the women's revolution, incomplete as it is, may be the harbinger of new inequalities and possibly even deeper socioeconomic polarization. If this is so, then families and markets, in and of themselves, simply cannot manage. Hence, the need for, and reinvigorated interest in, the welfare state as the only social institution with the requisite capability. Why is this an "incomplete revolution" in women's roles? Esping-Andersen explains that he chose that title to stress two things: the movement from one equilibrium to another, and the "sub-optimal outcomes" apparent in the incomplete transition, including very low fertility levels, and more polarization in family incomes and parental investments in children due to marital homogamy and unequal societal distribution of gender equality. This last point is crucial to the book's argument. If the dual-career norm is limited to, or more prevalent among, those at the top of the social pyramid, then the benefits of two incomes accrue to those couples whose marriages tend, on average, to be more stable (he argues), and who can afford to invest more in their children, as well as to save and plan for their own later years. Esping-Andersen takes a life course perspective from the outset, making the strong case that life cycle stages must be seen as connected. He goes so far as to claim that pension reform begins with babies, while blushing at his venture into what he calls political sloganeering. That said, the life course perspective is key to the extent that widening in-